When team members add subjective, blanket complaints like bad communication or low team morale to the Issues List, how does the room dig down to the concrete root cause during IDS?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Blanket phrases like poor communication, lack of accountability, and low morale are symptoms, not issues. You cannot solve an emotional abstraction. If you attempt to discuss an issue framed as bad communication, the room will waste forty-five minutes venting without changing anything operational.

To find the issue behind the issue during the Identify step, the Integrator must immediately challenge the person who raised it to provide concrete evidence. Require them to answer two direct diagnostic questions:
- What is a specific, real-world example that happened in the last seven days?
- Who was involved, what process broke down, or what expectation was missed?

Once an actual incident is named, the abstract complaint vanishes. Poor communication usually reveals itself as an unwritten process, a missed handoff between sales and operations, or an unclear seat on the Accountability Chart. Low team morale frequently traces back to an employee who does not fit the Core Values or a manager who fails to provide clear Scorecard numbers.

Keep asking why until the root cause is pinned to one of three areas: a person issue, a process issue, or an organizational structure issue. If it is a process flaw, update the core process. If it is a seat or expectations issue, adjust the Accountability Chart. If it is a personnel mismatch, use the People Analyzer.

Never move to the Discuss step until the issue is framed as a single, factual statement that everyone around the table agrees is the real obstacle. Once the real root cause is exposed, the Discuss step takes five minutes and the Solve step yields actionable, assigned to-dos.